Follow the Dead by Lin Anderson

It's Hogmanay (New Year) in Aviemore. Forensic scientist Dr Rhona Macleod is enjoying a
well-earned holiday. Or she would be if she hadn't offered to join
the Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team when they are called out to two
emergencies high in the mountains. There are reports of a crashed
aircraft on the ice of a frozen loch, and a group of four experience
young climbers have been reported missing in the same area. The stage
is set for tragedy. It soon becomes clear that the plane crash has
resulted in at least one death, and then three of the four young climbers
are found dead in what seems to Rhona to be slightly odd circumstances.
Meanwhile the fourth is still missing and weather conditions are deteriorating.

Back in Glasgow, Detective Sergeant Michael McNab
is taking part in
a raid on a club. He expects to find cocaine in large quantities,
and does. But he also finds much more, and it becomes clear
that Glasgow
is the destination of a people-smuggling operation involving young
girls. One girl, though originally from far to the south and east,
seems to speak some Norwegian, and links begin to be made with the
crashed aircraft in the Cairngorms, which is also Norwegian. Enter
a third central character, Norwegian detective Alvis Olsen, who has
theories of his own about what is going on. He and DS McNab are too
alike to work well together, but between them they make progress.
Until McNab drops off the radar altogether.

"Follow the Dead" by Lin Anderson is an outstanding thriller in which
the action initially moves back and forth between the Cairngorm Mountains
and Glasgow. The intriguing tentacles
of the storyline then reach out further, to Norway and elsewhere.
The pace is beautifully judged, and though there are plenty of twists
and turns, the reader never feels left behind. The book you become so
deeply immersed in isn't really a whodunit, because segments
are told from the perspective of the mysterious individual who is
responsible for the mayhem, but despite this the story gets under
the reader's skin and you find yourself drawn along remorselessly.
The climax generates real tension, and emerges as
a fittingly ambivalent conclusion to what has gone before.

In a book like this
so much depends on the strength of the central characters. Dr Rhona
MacLeod and DS Michael McNab have featured in a number of the author's previous
books and are superbly established. Each develops nicely during the
course of "Follow the Dead". McNab is a man who has faced and
overcome personal demons in the past, but will he be able to do so
again, given the way his professional life seems to bring grave misfortune
to everyone he meets, and especially to those he really cares about?